Scientists using a high-energy X-ray instrument say they have solved the long-running debate
about what kind of paint Picasso used in his masterpieces. It was common house paint, said Volker
Rose, a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory who led the study, published in
Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing.

Rose said they found that pigments from Picasso’s white paint revealed zinc oxide.

The scientists also bought samples of decades-old house paint on eBay. After comparing those
samples with Picasso’s paint, they determined that the two shared the same chemical makeup.

The instrument is a hard X-ray nanoprobe, developed to give scientists a close-up view of the
chemical elements in physical materials.